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058:
PISSING BLOOD
HOW MCGRIDDLES AND SUDOKU SAVE LIVES
In another super-personal and starkly-informative episode, Brad Singletary discusses his own experience with suicidal thoughts and what he did to save his own life.
Brad describes the Alpha Quorum’s intention with using the term ‘alpha.’ We are talking about men who are strong, capable, reliable, getting things done, and are enjoying fulfilling lives.
The Alpha is concerned with LIFE.
He has a life. He preserves his own capacity and remains strong, saving himself first: physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. He enjoys life and faces challenges in his own journey with courage and diligence.
He creates life. He creates life, not by fathering children, necessarily. But wherever he goes he brings light and life and brings value to any situation he finds himself in. He passes life on in many ways in his relationships to those close to him, and every human that he appropriately can.
He saves life. He lifts and rescues those in need, helping others preserve their own life.
Brad recounts a traumatic family experience dealing with the suicide of an American soldier.
He also describes some mind-blowing statistics about the duration of the crisis leading up to a suicde or an attempt, most often counted in minutes, not days.
Suicidal thoughts should be seen as a medical crisis, much like sudden blindness or pissing blood.
He shares tips for how to recognize suicidal risks and what to do when you or someone around you is feeling these things.
Whoever you are, this information will prepare you for a tragic situation that you will likely be affected by in some way or another during your life. Please listen and share.
Relevant Links:
HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Duration of Suicidal Crises
Alpha Quorum Website
TRIBE: Join the Private Facebook Group for Men
Follow Alpha Quorum on Instagram
Taco Moto
Brad Singletary’s Website
Follow Brad on Instagram
Follow Taco Mike on Instagram
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Brad Singletary (00:01):
Imagine that you go to take a piss and blood comes out, you panic, and you know that something is wrong. You don’t want to die. You don’t want to suffer in pain. So what do you do? Get help you go to the doctor, take your ass to the hospital, but all the same is true of one of the most common but misunderstood feelings that people have from time to time suicidal thoughts. I’ve had them myself. I checked myself into a hospital knowing that thinking this way was wrong and that I didn’t want my life to end that way. I knew that I didn’t want to die. I knew that I needed help and help is available. I got help. And when you think these things, you have to see them the same as if you were pissing blood, tell someone, reach out, stopped bleeding, recognize this isn’t cool. Stay for one more day.
Brad Singletary (01:34):
Welcome back to the Alpha Quorum show. Brad Singletary here. I’m all by myself tonight. Just hoping to do a little short solo episode. Mike is I’m not, I don’t even know where he is. Maybe traveling around the world, probably on his motorcycle somewhere. So I wanted to talk about something that is very personal to me. Many of you know that my profession is I work in mental health. I’m a therapist and have a private practice in the Las Vegas area. Something that changed my life a couple of years ago, almost three years ago now was the death of my wife’s brother who died by suicide. I don’t want to talk about that a little bit. In the Facebook group, we have a, I guess about 1300 members, worldwide men, all over the world who are trying to level up and be strong men.
Brad Singletary (02:26):
And someone asked the question the other day about what does it mean to be alpha? And what is, what is our use of the term alpha? And there’s a lot of information out there and that in the manosphere, a lot of stuff out there about, you know, being alpha as the guy who gets laid the most and the guy who, you know, the guy who gets the most respect and walks around town like a cocky arrogant person. Who’s just pulling women. As you hopefully know by now, that is not our definition of alpha. Instead, we’re talking more about men who are strong and capable and reliable and who are getting things done and care of their business and who are enjoying their lives. But that question has me thinking a little bit about what does it mean to be alpha? And for some reason I thought of three things they all have to do with life.
Brad Singletary (03:11):
So one is that he has life. He has a life. He creates life and he saves life. And what I mean, when I say he has life, he preserves himself. He preserves his own life, his capacity. He has enjoyment and fulfillment. He has a life. He creates life. And I don’t mean fatherhood necessarily. I just mean that wherever he goes, he’s providing value and he’s bringing life and light to other people. And lastly that he saves life. We think of the heroes of things like nine 11 or the shooting that was here in Las Vegas and the people who rescue others. We see those as alpha types who pull the person out of the burning rebel or, or help the person who’s bleeding or maybe even, you know, sacrifice themselves so that someone else may live. That’s totally alpha. Well, today I want to talk about suicidal thoughts and you could be the strongest man in the world, the most capable well-liked person ever.
Brad Singletary (04:14):
And you may be shocked at your emotional experience sometimes. And this is something that I think no one is immune to the statistics are that men are most likely to die by suicide as compared to women. And I wanted to share just a story from my personal life. So about two and a half years ago, actually on August 25th, 2017, I had, that was a Friday. I had spent that day in a continuing education class, ironically on suicide prevention. We had to do that once a year. So I did that during the day. And in the evening I went to see my clients and it was seven or eight o’clock at night. And my son kept calling my phone. Even though I was with clients after about the second or third phone call, I knew I had to answer and I could hear my wife in the background and she was just screaming and sobbing hysterically.
Brad Singletary (05:12):
And he said, something’s wrong? Can you please come home? Something happened to Kara’s brother. And I went home and I found her on the floor. She’s on the bathroom floor, just snot and drool and tears. And her face is red. And I felt like I knew what happened even before she spoke her brother, Jack was an Afghanistan veteran who was 25 years old. He was a us army Calvary scout and was responsible for detecting mines. And his unit was on the front line. And he was even in front of them. He had so many traumatic experiences and but he came home a hero. He had saved many lives and bandaged up the wounded. One of my favorite stories is about him, where he personally applied bandages and a tourniquet to an Afghan soldier after a particularly fierce attack from the Taliban. So it’s been almost two and a half years.
Brad Singletary (06:11):
And this suicide dramatically affected my family and many, many people as I work in mental health, I just believed that this is something that we don’t talk about enough. And too many men are dying soldiers alone, 22 veterans a day, die by suicide. And it’s interesting. The, the language and some of the things that have changed over the years, they used to talk about people committing suicide or those kinds of things. Now we talk about dying by suicide and I looked into the reasoning for that. And it is that this should be seen as a medical symptom. Like this is part of a, this is, this is almost like a person died of a heart attack. So suicidal thoughts are actually quite common, but they are, they should be seen as like a medical crisis. So the title about pissing blood that’s that’s, I just want to be a little provocative with that language to say, when these things come up for you, you have to understand that this is a, this is an emergency.
Brad Singletary (07:20):
This is not normal. The human will to survive is so powerful that things like cannibalism. I mean, you would cut your leg off and eat it. If you knew it would help you survive. We have such a strong drive to live. And when we cross over that, that barrier, when, when people get to the point where they’re really at the end, that way they are, they have, this is a severe, severely low level of functioning, and it should be seen as a crisis. Almost like if you’re all of a sudden go blind, you can’t see, you know, all of a sudden you’ve got terrible pain somewhere in your body and it disables your ability to walk or like you’re pissing blood in preparing for this. I looked at some research on the topic of suicide and I wanted to look at the duration of the crisis.
Brad Singletary (08:14):
So how often is this something that is well planned in advance? And how often is this kind of an impulsive thing? And I found some, some data on the on Harvard’s university’s website. And they say that while some suicides are deliberative and involve careful planning, many appear to have been hastily decided little or little to no planning. And they’ve got some information here that of people who survived a nearly lethal suicide attempt the duration, how long, how much time had passed from their attempt to the, the triggering, you know, the triggering event or the thought to do it. 24% said less than five minutes, 24% said five to 20 minutes. 23% said 20 minutes to an hour and 16% said two to eight hours. So this, these thoughts are coming often in a, in a hurry. These things are coming in a crisis in a sudden, a sudden onset of, you know, this thought that I cannot bear this anymore.
Brad Singletary (09:26):
I’ve got to do something only 13% said it had lasted for more than one day. So in my training, we talked about how the person may be, they’re going to go around and give all their belongings away and fill out a will and do all these things to kind of prepare for their eventual death. In two weeks. My experience with people who have both attempted suicide and have completed has been that this is usually a short term situation. And while they may have had that thought before, they may have had these ideations before the decision to go run and do this, sometime we’re talking 20 minutes from the thought of it happening to, to, to they’re passing an Australian study of emergency room visits found that 40% of people who attempted suicide took action within five minutes of deciding to do that. Another Australian study of survivor survivors of self-inflicted gunshot wounds 64% stated that their attempt was due to interpersonal conflict with a partner or family member.
Brad Singletary (10:34):
So that’s one of the things that puts people at extremely high risk. There’s a fight between a child and their parents, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a breakup. You found out some tragic news, someone’s been cheating on you. There’s just some terrible triggering event that happens that way. One third of those who are under age 18, who died by suicide in one, in one bit of data that I have here said that they experienced a crisis within 24 hours of taking their life. Another study of 268 patients who had attempted suicide by poisoning or overdosing found that just half had taken the poison less than 30 minutes after they thought to do so only 30 minutes of thought went into that or 30 minutes or less. So I want to talk about some of the risk factors for this. First of all, obviously if you are already dealing with depression or anxiety, which is a very high number 22 to 25%, let’s say of all people at any given time have a diagnosable mental health condition.
Brad Singletary (11:49):
And so that’s, I mean, one in five, one in four, one in five people driving around, maybe that number’s even higher right now. I just heard some information out of California that last month they had the same number of suicides last month in California, as they would have had in an entire year. And I’m sure that’s due to the stresses with the Corona virus and so forth. And so if you’re already dealing with depression, anxiety, you’re at risk, if you have, or have had intense interpersonal conflict, high risk, you’re an alcoholic drug user, high risk, you have sleep problems. You’re you’re high risk. Some of the stuff that I’m reading talks about, you know, if you’re sleeping too much, that could be an indicator of depression. What I found is that if you’re sleeping, you’re safe, I would much rather you sleep too much.
Brad Singletary (12:44):
I’d rather you sleep 20 hours a day because you’re alive. If you’re sleeping, but people who have attempted this or fallen into suicidal thoughts or feelings very often are not sleeping well at all. And, and some even describe that. What they’re, what they’re describing is not just this emptiness, like you would find in depression, but anxiety and panic to me as I’ve experienced that myself, that’s one of the most painful things that you could experience is intense anxiety. And so that often is disrupting sleep. So if you’re not sleeping well, you’re at risk. You have financial problems, you’re at risk gambling addiction. You know, you’ve got some shameful secret. Some of those kinds of things put you at risk. The reason I’m talking about this is because of the stress that we’re all faced with right now with this virus. And now there’s some of this stuff in the political arena out there about racial tension.
Brad Singletary (13:43):
And there’s just so many things going on that are troubling. People are having financial difficulties. There’s domestic violence is up in all kinds of problems or are, are facing all of us right now. And the attention is just rising, but men are particularly high risk for this of those who complete suicide most are men. And I think that has to do with the fact that they have, they’re more aggressive. They have access to more lethal means like guns and so forth firearms. They’re also, this is a stereotype, but a generalized thought, but that men are less likely to discuss their feelings. They’re more likely to feel shame about the depressed feelings that they may have. And so if any of that describes you, please talk to someone as I’m looking at some statistics here. So our audience here is I would say listening to this show males from the ages of 25 to 55 and in the 25 to 35 year old range, suicide is the second leading cause of death.
Brad Singletary (14:48):
Second, only to accidents and the rain from 35 to 55 years old suicide is the fourth leading cause of death serious stuff. So this is very common and I just also wanted to share something of my own experience. So about 10 years ago I got divorced and that was, that was a difficult adjustment. Of course it led me into a primary addiction that I’ve dealt with for many years, which is alcohol. And I started drinking to try to cope with my pain and that disrupted my sleep and all of those things just kind of kept compounding. And I remember thinking probably for a couple of months every now and then the thought would just come to me. You know, one of, one of the I’m I’m going to choose to end my own life. Like I wasn’t planning it. I, it just crossed my mind that someday I’m just going to decide on my own wind to die.
Brad Singletary (15:48):
It’s not going to happen to me. I’m going to, I’m going to do it. And that bothered me because I’m, I’m a clinician. I work in mental health. I’m I help people to deal with those feelings themselves. And so I knew something was off, but I never really said anything. And it continued to intensify. And as my sleep, you know, I’m going on four hours of sleep per night, as that continued to compound day after day and week after week I continued to drink, that’s a whole messy situation where you’re really destabilizing your, your, your emotional health with, with alcohol. And so I started then to visualize what I would do. I didn’t have plans. I wasn’t making preparations. I just kind of had these images in mind about what it would look like and what I would do. And that started to get more and more terrifying for me.
Brad Singletary (16:44):
So I reached out to some people who could help me. And I just kind of told them, Hey, I’m thinking these thoughts. I, I don’t think, I don’t think this is a problem for me. You know, I don’t think I’m really at risk, but I just wanted you to know, can you check in with me? I got rid of any firearms in my home and and I felt okay. And so some of that seemed to pass and then months went by and I had some other stress come up for me and I one night under the, under the influence, I just really felt like I was at risk. I got some bad news during that time that I had been drinking. I drove myself to the hospital and I explained what happened. And the guy kind of said, Hey, you know, do you think you really need to go in the hospital would go to want to handle this on an outpatient basis?
Brad Singletary (17:36):
And I said, no, I think I’m going to hang myself. And so they checked me into the hospital and I spent about four days, but no five days in a psychiatric unit. Now this was pretty embarrassing for me because I work in mental health. And although Las Vegas is a town of say 2 million people, the mental health world is pretty small here. And I ran across people that I knew in the hospital. And then there are these groups and things. I go to the group and they’re asking me, asking everybody, what do you do? What’s going on in your life? And that kind of thing. And I said, well, I’m a mental health therapist. And I felt pretty embarrassed that I should have known better, but I also felt like, Hey, I’m just a human being and I’m having this struggle. So I’m here and this is what’s going on.
Brad Singletary (18:29):
So it was one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. I got immediately got on medication. I talked to a psychiatrist every day that I was there. I got lots of sleep and I went five days with no alcohol. And that was that was the longest period I had been in a long time. And some of it though was I felt trapped. You know, the hospital is not fun. It’s in some ways it’s like jail. They take your shoe laces and you’ve got to wear these weird clothes and things. And there were some awful things about that that I, I felt a little maybe disgusted by, but I just had to grin and bear it. And when I got out, I felt like I had a new lease on life. I started some therapy. I continued on my medication and that’s probably been maybe eight years ago and I’ve been okay for the most part since then, I did notice that after a vacation this was a year or two ago, I went on vacation and I had been eating very well, eating very clean before this vacation.
Brad Singletary (19:38):
So I go down to Florida, go down to my mom’s and, you know, there’s all kinds of sweets and comfort foods and all this kind of junk and tons of sugar. And I leave the vacation and I come home and I just, my emotional health just sank. I swear that as soon as I kind of cleaned up what I was eating I felt better, but I was, I was, I started to have some suicidal thoughts again, and I reached out again and told some people, Hey, this is where my thoughts have been. And they just kind of checked in with me and made sure that I was okay. And I had a plan. I was going to work. I was sleeping well, and that I was doing all the things I need to do to keep myself alive within a couple of days after changing my eating patterns I felt much better.
Brad Singletary (20:24):
And that’s been, I’ve haven’t had any problem with that ever since, but it made me research on, I had been interested in things like inflammation, being connected to things like depression and anxiety. Heart disease are finding a lot of the heart disease, heart attacks. A lot of that’s coming from, from inflammation, which many times is caused by food. Maybe there are things in the environment I knew for me, I’m eating like shit. And so this is totally throwing my chemistry and my body off. And as long as I try to be reasonable and what I’m putting in my body, those things, those things aren’t, you know, I don’t have a problem with that. So I just want to end here in a few minutes and just talk about what you can do. If you start to feel these things, if you, if these thoughts come to mind, what it is that you need to do.
Brad Singletary (21:16):
I think the first thing to consider, if you have suicidal thoughts or feel like life isn’t worth living, or that you would be better off dead or that people around you would be better off is just to recognize number one, that that is, that is not a very uncommon thing. If you ask people around you, how many of them have ever thought of it ever considered it ever wondered about just being dead, what it would be like to be gone from here, or even to the thought to intentionally take their own life. I think you would find that many of the people, you know, if they’re being honest will admit that that has been something that’s crossed their mind before. So if you recognize that these are maybe somewhat normal thoughts in as part of the human condition and not keep this a secret and not allow yourself to think that this means that you’re weak.
Brad Singletary (22:09):
And so, so many of our dysfunctions thrive in secrecy. And so I noticed that with like addiction, one of the best things that people can do to overcome an addiction is to talk about it. And what do they do? They go to meetings and they say, hi, my name is Brad, and I’m an alcoholic. And that’s a big part of the whole thing is stop, pretending, stop hiding this stuff. You need to share it. Maybe 10 people in your life need to know that you deal with this. Well, some people are afraid, Oh, they’ll think I’m just as just a cry for attention or they’ll think I’m just you know, they think I’m being weak. You know, that’s what girls do. That’s not what men do. Not true, not true. Another thought about what to do when you’re having these feelings is to know that things aren’t always going to feel this way.
Brad Singletary (22:55):
I shared earlier about how so many of the people who have attempted or died by suicide did so within say a half an hour of the initial thought. So these are temporary feelings and maybe nothing much has changed from today. If you’re feeling this way today, maybe there’s not much that’s actually different from yesterday or two days ago or a week ago. The only thing that’s changed is the emotion of this moment. And that emotion will change. I remember I did a, an intensive outpatient therapy group for several years at a mental health clinic here in Las Vegas. And this was a three hour a day group for people that were dealing with suicidal thoughts and severe mental illness and things like that. I remember one day this girl came in, she was probably 19 or 20. She came in, this was 9:00 AM. She came into the group, she was sobbing and crying and just felt like everything was like her life was over in that she was just in this despair.
Brad Singletary (23:55):
And about halfway through the group, we would take a break. Smokers would go outside and smoke and everybody else would have a soda or walk around for a few minutes. Well, this building was right next door to McDonald’s and this girl came back. She went during the break and she got a coffee and a McGriddle, and she came back and she was a completely different person. And so to me it was evidence. So even though she had kind of done her turn with talking, I pointed that out that she seemed to be feeling different because she had eaten and something as simple as a nap, some water, some food, some of those things can so quickly change our chemistry and therefore our thinking. We just have to believe that we’ve got to make it through this, this moment. You just got some bad news. You found it, you just found out your spouse cheated on you or that your, you know, someone’s filed for divorce or there’s something crazy has happened to you.
Brad Singletary (24:54):
And your heart is pounding and you’re seeing red. And you just can’t imagine, you know, going on without it, give this two hours, give it 24 hours. One of the things that helped me survive the most difficult times of my life was you’re going to laugh Sudoku. That’s the little number puzzle with the numbers, one through nine anyway it gave me something else to focus on. So another thing that you can do when you think about when you, when you have suicidal thoughts or feelings is to put your mind somewhere else, I put it into Sudoku books and I never got past medium, medium difficulty. I really enjoyed the, the easy ones, but and then when the smartphones kind of started to become more proper, there were some Sudoku apps. And I haven’t needed to use those for that anymore, but our minds are kind of like YouTube, you know, and if there’s a video playing on YouTube, you can skip it.
Brad Singletary (25:55):
You can X out of that thing and put on something else. And so distraction is another, another way to recognize this as a passing fleeting thought, emotions don’t last, put something else in place, reach out to someone and have a conversation. Even if you’re not ready to talk about that, make a call to a friend or family member. Maybe you find someone who needs your friendship and maybe needs your support and love that can help you work through suicidal feelings. But I think you do have to say it. I think you have to say images are coming to my mind of me killing myself. I need you to know that I need you to know that I’ve been contemplating suicide. I don’t, I don’t want to do that, but I can’t. I can’t stop thinking about it. Sometimes I feel hopeless. Like that’s the only way to get through this.
Brad Singletary (26:44):
So use the language I was in a training a couple of years ago and something that kind of the generic therapist talk the question I used to ask people, you know, do you ever have any thoughts of hurting yourself? And they taught me that that wasn’t effective. That wasn’t good enough. I had to say the word suicide. And it just, it made my, it made me feel weird. I didn’t want to say, I don’t want to say the word suicide. I don’t want to say to the person I’ve known for 15 minutes, are you having thoughts of suicide? It just was an interesting shift that we have to be specific. And if you’re having those thoughts, don’t be afraid to say the word, another fear that people have when they’re having suicidal thoughts is that they’re going to be locked up. They’re going to the crazy house they’re going to go.
Brad Singletary (27:28):
You know, so they didn’t want to say anything because they believe that they’re going to be punished for that. Don’t be worried about five days of inconvenience. I think you need to worry about what you’re going to leave behind. I think you need to worry about the lives that are going to be effected if you die by suicide in the documentary about Kevin Hines. Great story about a man who jumped off the golden gate bridge. But he lived, he was attempting suicide, but he lived in almost no one survives that. And he talked about all the people and he interviewed some of the people that whose lives were affected. You know, they were police officers and nurses in the hospitals and doctors and family members. And I think that the number is on average, 150 people are directly affected by one suicide. And when I think about my brother-in-law, my wife’s brother who took his life, I didn’t really know him.
Brad Singletary (28:27):
I had a couple conversations with him, met him once or maybe twice, but it deeply affected me, deeply affected my marriage and therefore affected my children. There were days that I had to cancel all of my clients and cancel all my work because I wasn’t in the mental space to be able to do that, that put those clients at risk, who are already at risk. So if you don’t want five days of inconvenience, you know, maybe at the, at the worst, you gotta be thinking about what happens if you, if you die. And you’re, I don’t know how I feel about this thought, but one of the ideas is that suicide doesn’t end pain. It just gives it to everyone else. And you know, I don’t want to use that as any kind of guilt measure or anything like that, but the impact is real.
Brad Singletary (29:18):
Everyone around you is going to be impacted another thought about what to do when you’re feeling like you just can’t make it. You know, that you’re at the end of your rope is to move your body, move your state, get outside, change your situation. If you’re pacing back and forth in your house, or you’re laying in bed, looking at the ceiling, you, you need to get your ass up and get breathing hard and go and exercise some of your, get your, get your muscles moving. Maybe you’re just going to take a brisk walk around the block that you’re just going to get moving in that moment. But in general, that’s going to help you. If you have more movement in your life every day, something that I’ve learned personally is to separate my feelings from what I believe is factual. Or like at one point I kept imagining that I would, I would die by my own hand.
Brad Singletary (30:15):
I thought that that’s what would happen. I thought that those images were coming to me because that’s what I should do. And sometimes even in like a, you know, a spiritual sense, people have fears or they have thoughts or feelings. And they think this is a, some impression that God has given them or something like it’s really hard to separate our emotions from reality sometimes. And I think my point here is that feelings aren’t facts. You may feel like everyone in your life will be better off if you’re not here. That doesn’t mean that’s a fact. You may feel like you can’t carry on. Not a fact. You may feel like you’ve tried everything and that there’s no way out. There’s no way to resolve your situation and no way to come out on top or to feel better. Again, that is not a fact.
Brad Singletary (31:03):
And so to separate feelings from facts, I think he’s an important part of handling emotional health. Listen, I’ve, I’ve experienced enough of hardship and pain and shock in my life to know what some of those feelings are. If you’re going through something really difficult. I mean, things maybe I haven’t ever experienced and things I couldn’t ever imagine, maybe a person in your own family died by suicide. And you’re dealing with the aftermath of that. You’ve had a child pass away, terrible breakup, some huge financial loss. You just lost a million dollars in what happened with the stock market, with the coronavirus. I don’t know what may be your struggle. You have to believe that you can get on the other side of this. Sometimes that means 10 minutes. That means in 10 minutes and a damn McGriddle, you’re going to feel better. 10 minutes, 10 days, some good sleep, some connecting with other people you can get on the other side of this, that’s what an alpha does.
Brad Singletary (32:06):
He believes differently. He believes that he can handle the hardship that he’s facing. He reaches out for help when it’s necessary. And it is necessary. If you’re having thoughts or mental pictures coming to you about suicide, you need to tell someone as if you’re pissing blood, there is no other way around it. This is a medical symptom. Please stay one more day. So what if it’s not you that’s having these feelings? What if this is someone in your life, another man one of your children or someone that you know, a family member, you know, your, your, your wife or partner. I think you need to take every one of these thoughts. Seriously, never write this off as something where someone is just trying to get attention. I think you need to listen. If you don’t have the capacity to listen, get them with someone who can recognize again, that this is someone’s attempt to stay alive.
Brad Singletary (33:09):
If they’re telling you this, it means they need you to know it because they don’t want this to happen. Earlier. We said that an alpha is someone who preserves life, who brings life and sustains life. Well, that’s what a person is doing. If they say, Hey, I’m having thoughts of suicide or, you know, I just feel like I just feel like ending it sometimes. Or they may say something kind of vague. And so you need to take that seriously. Don’t be afraid to say, Hey man, are you thinking about killing yourself? Someone asked me that it was actually a boss, someone that I really up to and I was blown away. I felt offended. I was, I was super offended because I thought, what makes you see that in me? What I’m I’m I work here in this job, in this professional capacity. And you would ask me that question.
Brad Singletary (33:57):
I was pissed off. I was so angry. The truth is I was thinking that it wasn’t long after that, that I checked myself into the hospital. And so don’t be afraid to ask someone that question, wouldn’t joke about it. Don’t shame them for the thought of that. Take it seriously, be their friend, and realize that if they’re talking to you at all, they’re trying to save their own life. And it may be hard to say the words they may be so ashamed and embarrassed that they’re having those feelings, that they can’t say that. So if they’re coming to you, take it seriously, get them help follow through, ask about things like weapons in their home question. That’s really important in a mental health assessment that I would often do, has to do with access. So if a person says, yeah, I think I’m just going to shoot myself.
Brad Singletary (34:45):
And they have a house full of guns and ammo. They, that, that increases the risk. And so maybe that’s something you help them with to, Hey, man, let me, let me, let me take these guns for you for a little bit. And you can keep those at my house and work through a plan with it. I can’t, I mean, this is a podcast. I can’t, I can’t cover all of the areas that may need to be dealt with with this in your specific situation. The point is I wanted to open the dialogue. I wanted to open the, the, the thought and, and help you understand what it is you might do for yourself or others who were feeling these things. Please reach out to me or taco Mike, if you have, if you, if you need to discuss something like this, we’ll get you set up with the right plan of action to keep you around.
Brad Singletary (35:31):
We need you here, brother. Stay with us. Hey, thanks for listening to another episode of the alpha quorum show. We believe that men change their lives by engaging with a tribe to improve their actions, attitudes, and attributes. You can check out the show notes on our website at alphaquorum.com. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook. And please leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to our show, Hey, this is a podcast not therapy. So even though we may feature professionals on the show, this is not intended as therapeutic advice. If you need someone to talk to please reach out to us and we can get you pointed in the right direction until next time, gentlemen,
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